Karim Shammas was sitting impatiently in the black Mercedes taxi that was taking him to Beirut airport en route back to Montpellier. All at once the sky lit up and the whistling started. The driver ducked to protect himself from the mortar shells that had begun to fall on the airport road. Suddenly the car veered off. Karim heard the screeching of tires and felt everything shake. He closed his eyes and prepared for death. He heard the driver shout that he was going back to Beirut. He opened his eyes and asked the driver to keep going and get him to the airport. Then the car stopped and he heard the driver’s voice say through the screeching of the tires that he couldn’t. “If you want to go on, sir, find yourself another car. I’ve got children and I want to go home.”
Karim had a vision of himself as another person. He got out of the car, bent over the trunk, lifted out his suitcase, set off down the middle of the dusty, garbage-strewn road, and thought that he’d reached the end of the world.
This was how his Beirut adventure ended, with a ringing in his ears and a feeling that he was supporting himself with his shadow. When he caught sight of the Beirut airport building, with its ruined façade, he looked back and wept.
He entered the check-in area. It was cold and empty, with shards of glass from the windows lying on the tiles. He had to tread on the glass to get to the check-in desk for the plane to Paris.
He could hear the glass crunching under his shoes as he went forward in the direction of an airline attendant. She had covered her hair in a blue cap and looked at him with silent, astonished eyes. Suddenly the airport concourses began to shake. It was a soundless bombardment, or so it seemed to Karim, who found himself a seat in a corner, far from the shattered windows. The shelling was like a roaring so hoarse no one could hear it. At that moment he felt a desire to write a long letter to his twin in which he would apologize to him for everything and tell their story from the beginning.
In his pocket he found the piece of paper on which he’d written the phone numbers of Radwan and Abd el-Malek, and on which he’d drawn a plan of the Castle of Saint-Gilles, though he’d placed it at the edge of a steep valley — like those of the south that are overlooked by Shaqif Castle. He turned the piece of paper over onto its blank side and began writing. He wrote a number of lines, read them several times, and discovered that they weren’t right for the beginning of a letter that would be worthy of his story with his brother.
The shelling didn’t stop. Flashes traversed the city’s empty sky, which was covered with a dust resembling fog; a soundless bombardment that seemed to penetrate the walls, the windows, the body. He wrote to his brother that he had listened at the airport to a new kind of shelling that no one had ever heard before, that he was tired, and that he wanted to sleep.
He looked at the lines he’d written and found the words were piling up on top of one another, and that the language in which he’d written them no longer served to carry their meanings. He tore the letter up and threw it on the ground, among the scattered fragments of crushed glass. Then he closed his eyes, sat in the darkness of his soul, and decided that to embrace the darkness in a city like Beirut led to death. And such a death, he thought, would be a fitting end to a novel written by Elias Khoury.